Sons of the Clouds, a documentary about the wretched and persistent state of the Western Sahara's people.

A Werewolf Boy, a Korean fantasy/drama, beginning with an orphan rescued from the wild.

Oblivion, which I'll see despite Tom Cruise, balanced by the inimitable Morgan Freeman. With Earth all but abandoned in the terrible aftermath of a nearly final war, only a few people remain, monitoring and cleaning up. Until.. =:)

The ABCs of Death, a horror anthology, with each of 26 directors given a letter of the alphabet to signify their theme. Interestingly, there's an anthro fox in one of them..

Hecho en México, a look at the vibrant and diverse music, art, and culture of Mexico. Seems like it'll have a killer soundtrack to boot.

Agh! Indeed, yes.. there are some insightful comments on /. articles from time to time, but the bulk are what people have come to expect from the site. Rather unfortunate, but Hacker News tends to be a good few notches above, these days, even if still with some reactionary commenters.

It'll be fun to see how things develop in 2013. ^_^ Right now, it's still very much at an early stage of realisation - the principles have been demonstrated and vindicated, but there's plenty more to be done in cutting down the complexity of the contours, which segues into matters of psychovisual perception, as well as the fun involved in transforming it into more of a video-based codec, by intelligently ascertaining which contours don't need to be resent for a new frame, but can be derived from one already received. Currently, it's all frame-by-frame, à la M-JPEG.

people there either don't read the articles (likely) or read them and then go on to misunderstand them

Hee! Yep, RTFA even gained its own acronym, out of frequent need. I suppose it's something of a microcosm of the net's population generally - even with all the resources imaginable, some people will prefer to derive their impression of a story from just the headline or synopsis, rather than spending a mere minute or two gaining an initial understanding. Of course, that's all not helped by so much of the web's tech press being less about information than opinion, giving rise to a never-ending flow of link-bait headlines, fueled by tech "politics".

Hey ho. Maybe I'll see if the profs want to chime in on one of the sites - I imagine there are, nonetheless, people who do want to find out more about just why this project is underway, and what the upshot of it all will be.

Of course, that's all not helped by so much of the web's tech press being less about information than opinion, giving rise to a never-ending flow of link-bait headlines, fueled by tech "politics".

Indeed! And Slashdot is a big part of that; most of their stories are written to inflame rather than inform. It's definitely a tabloid site, not a place for reasoned discussion.

I'm not sure about Hacker News; I never really read it, and the reactionary comments you mention were part of why I didn't get into it. In fact, I think these are symptomatic of a larger problem: people who are experts in one area sometimes have a tendency to assume that they're experts in all other fields, too, and those who are aware that they are of above-average intelligence (far above, indeed) sometimes believe that their intelligence automatically makes them more insightful as well.

In reality, we all have our blind spots, of course, and the ability to say "I don't know anything about this subject", or even just "I haven't read up on this, so I don't feel qualified to form an opinion" is something that too many people are lacking.

Of course, I also think that commenters on these sites – any sites, really – aren't necessarily representative of readers. Quite the opposite; the crazier comments get, the less likely it'll be that saner people will participate in the discussion. Youtube comments are probably a good example, and they're usually sufficiently lowbrow for just about everyone to see that comments and their craziness needn't be representative of anything. :)

As for Slashdot, BTW, when I was hanging out there, you'd frequently see people told not just to RTFA but also to RTFS. Says it all, doesn't it? And the lack of quality control by editors and the tabloid angle the site deliberately takes makes it difficult to use it even as a source for stories, without the comments. They just take the most outrageous stuff they can find elsewhere and spin it so it's even more outrageous.

It does add up. ^_^; Obviously, those are just the ones that struck me as either saying something new or inspiring, or more mainstream, simply especially well done (eg Oblivion. Apparently filmed in digital 4K resolution, FWIW).